Re: Frontlines and the antiwar movement

[John Paramo <albatrosrojo2000@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Thank you for taking the time to ellaborate in this
relatively side issue of the discussion:

JP:
>IMO, *all class societies* were and are tributaries
>and Feudalism was one of them but wasn't the most
>tributary of all, therefore it was not a
>differentiating quality of the system.
>
>JP

Lou:

"I was a little rushed at work today and couldn't get
into more detail on 
this, but I was referring to the technical term some
Marxist scholars use 
as an alternative to feudalism. I recommend John
Haldon's "The State and 
the Tributary Mode of Production" in particular,
although Samir Amin seems 
to have coined the term. It is an attempt to find a
more general category 
than feudalism, which is obviously hard-wired to the
European experience."

Comment:

Thanks for the info, I though the original comment you
made would have been related to these attempts to
re-define Feudalism in order to make it less than an
Eurocentric category that is difficult to transplant
as a definition to other continents and social
experiences, but I wasn't sure.

That remains one of the main problems of Marxism which
is its need to be updated to reflect the changes in
society as well as the new stage of knowledge.  Samir
Amin's and other theorists seems to have failed to
grasp the essentials necessary to define stages of
history and their "tributary" notion seems to be at
least too ambiguous as to replace the "feudal"
definition. And too broad as to make it sufficiently
differential from other systems.

But I appreciate the attempts to do so.  In fact,
whoever comes up with a summarizing and generalizing
new definitions of stages that will, respecting the
Marxist method of "Origin...", serve for the purpose
of generalizing historical developments, would be
doing a great service to the development of Marxism in
its historical materialist aspects (which I consider
presently much more important that political economy.)

I had little political agreement with the late E.B.
Leacock but I though her introduction of "Origins..."
in 1971 contains a number of excellent points,
including the following:

"A rather simple but often overlooked confusion has
plagued subsequent discussions of historical "stages."
 There is a common failure to distinguish between the
definition of stages as a necessary preliminary step
to asking meaningful questions about a given period,
institution or event, and stages seen as themselves
the answers. "Stages" define major alternatives in the
structure of productive relations; they afford a
conceptual framework for the study of historical
process.  To place a society in a central or
transitional position in relation to one or more
stages is a necessary preliminary step to inquiry, not
a straitjacket that limits it." (pp. 14, "Introduction
to Origin...', International Publishers)

Only after 1965, as far as I know, Russian historians
were allowed to challenge the straitjacket notions and
utilization of "stages" as pre-determined and rigid
categories when Semenov and others started talking
about the relativity of the development of productive
forces as the basis for the development of society,
but not both necessarily to be found as contemporary
phenomena and accepted, to certain degree and without
mentioning it by name, the law of uneven and combined
development, or some aspects of it.

Unfortunately, I did not read a convincing new
"stages" theory so far...  I think that the attempts -
not yours but from others - to stick with a rigid
interpretation of the stages as defined in
"Origins..." is the source of lots of present-day
confusions and misinterpretations of political
processes.  Hopefully, somebody with the talent to do
so will help us out of this theoretical "problem."

JP

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